system

May I remind you why I call the Earth Gaia? It came about in the 1960s when the author William Golding, who subsequently won the Nobel and many other prizes, was near neighbor and friend. We both lived in the village of Bowerchalke, twelve miles southwest of Salisbury in southern England. We would often talk on scientific topics on walks around the village or in the village pub, the Bell Inn. In 1968 or 1969, during a walk, I tried out my hypothesis on him; he was receptive because, unlike most literary figures, he had taken physics while at Oxford as an undergraduate and fully understood the science of my argument. He grew enthusiastic and said, "If you are intending to come out with a large idea like that, I suggest that you give it a proper name: I propose 'Gaia.'" I was pleased with his suggestion - it was a word, not an acronym, and even then I saw the Earth as in certain ways alive, at least to the extent that it appeared to regulate its own climate and chemistry. Few scientists are familiar with the classics, and are unaware that Gaia is sometimes given the alternate name 'Ge.' Ge, of course, is the prefix of the sciences of geology, geophysics and geochemistry. To Golding, Gaia, the goddess who brought order out of chaos, was the appropriate title for a hypothesis about an Earth system that regulate its climate and chemistry so as to sustain habitability.

I can only find answers, you can only find answers, the world can only find answers, when you and I as individuals escape the pacified herd, escape the system of control around us and in our heads and recognize the two voices shouting louder even than the massed might of propaganda - the voices inside our desolated hearts and outside in the desolated environment.

The forbidden truth is that we are living by a set of lies which are necessary for short-term profit, at the expense of human physical and psychological life and global environmental integrity. We are living in a system where power ensures that the requirements of profit take priority over the requirements of living things-including the need to know that this is the case. Consequently our freedom extends as far as, and no further than, the satisfaction of these requirements, with all else being declared neurosis, paranoia, communism, extremism, the work of the devil, or Neptunian nonsense.

So it's worth pondering that this whole system, which we are calling 'thought', works as a system of reflexes. The question is: can you become aware of the reflex character of thought--that it is a reflex, that it is a whole system of reflexes which is constantly capable of being modified, added to, changed? And we could say that as long as the reflexes are free to change then there must be some kind of intelligence or perception, something a bit beyond the reflex, which would be able to see whether it's coherent or not. But when it gets conditioned too strongly it may resist that perception; it may not allow it.

Thought reflexes get conditioned very strongly, and they are very hard to change. And the also interfere. A reflex may connect to the endorphins and produce an impulse to hold that whole pattern forther. In other words, it produces a defensive reflex. Not merely is it stuck because it's chemically so well built up, but also there is a defensive reflex which defends against evidence which might weaken it. Thus it all happens, one reflex after another after another. It's just a vast system of reflexes. And they form a 'structure' as they get more rigid.

There may be a potential beyond the system. If it's true inquiry, then perhaps it is beyond the system. But don't assume it, because then it will be part of the system. Every assumption goes into the system.